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"A large morphologic classification map of animals and plants"


The map is a part of the center circle in the next figure. The letter "小" means the biosphere. Click the center circle of this picture if you want to know for more detail. Baien has picked up only living beings other than human at the upper chart . The center character "生" shows what is living force. That divides two areas, one is animals, and the other one is plants, and get various shapes as needed. Baien wrote in GENGO "There is no end to that transformation."

The character "龍" means not only crocodiles but also other aquatic animals other than fish, which have no shell or spines. If we were to draw a picture centered on the "龍," we would be able to break it down even further. But middle Edo era scholar Baien did not know about the creatures of far land from Japan, where are Afrika, India and South Amerika, and so on.
The letters with no link are described next.
  • "生"  → vital power
  • "動"  → organisms which can move
  • "植"  → organisms which are planted
  • "定形" → normal form
  • "變形" → unnormal form
  • "陸植" → organisms which are planted on the earth
  • "水植" → organisms which are planted in the water
  • "堅植" → planted entities which have a hard body on the earth
  • "輭植" → planted organisms which have a soft body
  • "輭動" → moving organisms which have a soft body
  • "堅動" → moving organisms which have a hard body

Most readers will question the classification of stone and soil into plants. Baien classified them according to their existence style. He writes that feathers are plants of birds, and hairs are plants of animals. In other words, they ranked as being planted. So, according to his classification, corals and ascidians become plants.

Baien had a separate perspective from the systematic taxonomy. I believe that is the classification by the existence style. There is no problem with any rating if it is reasonable. In the thought of Baien, plants mean something that is on the condition that planted. He thought stone and topsoil planted on the globe. According to the idea, our hair planted on our scull and our teeth planted in our gums. Those can not move because those are not animals. But we can not call them the plants. They are "something that planted as the existence style."

His ideas will seem strange to studiers who have studied Western taxonomy. However, this is quite common for the theory of sets. Baien thought of a set of "something that cannot move freely" and a set of "something that can move freely", and put them as a counterpart to each other. The former includes rocks, soil, and plants and can not move by themselves. Among the latter are insects, fishes, animals, and birds and can move by their will freely.

He divided the world according to the same protocol. For example, one is the scale of the celestial sphere, and the other one is a scale of earth. He always divided the world into two categories which are separated by counter character. And he tried the dividing until reaching the biggest and the smallest scale again and again.

He also tried to divide the organisms on the land and under the water of the Globe. He separated them into the two counter character 's set, one is a set of animals, and the other is the plants. And He tried to divide them into more pairs, which showed the picture above.

There are various kinds of animals and plants, but Baien only considered the extent to which it consists of a pair. If you click on the letters in the small circle, you'll see a wide variety of creatures. The idea is entirely different from the Western systematic taxonomy. Baien thought of the group of existence in the world according to the theory of set entirely.

The system of Gengo would be universal within the next 100 years because that is parallel with an ecosystem structure and has application possibility to the ecosystem engineering.


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